Retired Priest, 96, Arraigned on Child Pornography Charges

A 96-year-old retired priest who was once a high-ranking official of the Archdiocese of New York was arraigned in State Supreme Court in the Bronx on Tuesday on charges of possessing child pornography. The pictures, which were on his computer, were of girls ages 8 to 14 years old performing sex acts with men or posing naked, the Bronx district attorney said.

In announcing the indictment, the Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, said that Msgr. Harry J. Byrne, who lives at the St. John Vianney Center for Retired Priests in the Bronx, regularly showed people who came into his room the disturbing images.

“Monsignor Byrne has dedicated 72 years to charity in the church with an unsullied history,” said his lawyer, Marvin Ray Raskin. “It is difficult to imagine that at the age of 96, he knowingly understood and is responsible for the content of a particular subject on a computer accessible to numerous people.”

Monsignor Byrne was indicted on 37 counts of possessing child pornography. He was arraigned before Justice Robert Neary and released, and is due back in court on Jan. 17. If convicted of the top charge, he could face up to four years in prison and would have to register as a sex offender.

The investigation began about five months ago, when officials at the residence notified the district attorney’s office after receiving complaints about Monsignor Byrne. According to the investigation, he sought out the images of young girls using search engines like Google and Bing. Police detectives found the images on his computer, which was in his room at the residence, the district attorney’s office said.

Joseph Zwilling, the spokesman for the New York Archdiocese, said that there have never been any allegations against Monsignor Byrne before.

“Monsignor Byrne is 96. He has been retired for more than 20 years,” he said. He added that the archdiocese and the residence where Monsignor. Byrne lives have both been cooperating fully with the investigation.

Monsignor Byrne was chancellor of the New York Archdiocese from 1968 to 1970. He was also chairman in the 1960s of its Social Justice Task Force, and in that role, called on all priests to work for social change. As the decades passed, he became critical of younger priests who were not as eager to work on social issues such as housing and poverty as his generation had been.

“The newer priests don’t want to work in the inner cities,” Monsignor Byrne said in a 2000 article in The New York Times. “They like nice clean white cuffs, pressed surplices.”

Monsignor Byrne was also a blogger and prolific letter writer to The Times, publishing at least 15 letters to the editor in its pages. As the clergy sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church burst into the nation’s headlines in 2002, Monsignor Byrne wrote a letter to The Times calling for greater action by the church.

“The problem needs to be addressed on different levels: the despicable abuse itself and its reporting; the counterproductive secret settlements and cover-ups; the public relations failures in crisis management; and finally, the basic question of how this phenomenon came to occur in the system of recruiting, training, supervising, evaluating and retaining clergy,” he wrote.

Monsignor Byrne was pastor of the Church of the Epiphany in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood when he retired in 1996. He had also been pastor of St. Joseph’s Church in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood.